‘I look more like a boy anyway,’ she’d said. ‘So why shouldn’t I dress like one?’
Her mother hadn’t objected. There had been a rough few years after Nell’s father had left the army when he’d struggled to find work, and if Nell wanted to wear her brother’s castoffs, her mother didn’t have the money or the energy to complain. The other children had mostly accepted her as a sort of honorary boy, and if anyone said anything cutting, Nell’s fists soon taught them otherwise.
It got harder once she’d left school at fourteen, though. Nell had wanted to get a job as a delivery boy, like Bill. (Her Auntie Betty had married a grocer. Bill had gone to work for him the previous year, and all the Swancott children had learnt to ride on his bicycle). But she’d gone round every shop in Poplar and no one had wanted to hire a girl, even a girl in breeches, so she’d settled for a job in a jam factory instead.
She worked as a packer, which was not difficult, but it was dull. You had to fill up empty packing crates with jars of jam. That was it. When you’d filled one crate, you went and fetched an empty crate and did the same thing over again. The other packers were all girls, Nell’s age or mostly older. She didn’t dislike them, exactly, but they baffled her. Leaving school had changed everything, for everyone. The other girls her age were suddenly interested in clothes, and hairstyles, and boys, none of which Nell cared about at all. And the boys had begun to care about cigarettes, and pomade, and making fools of themselves in order to catch the girls’ attention. Nell, cut off from both groups, was lonely and resentful, and full of a baffling, miserable rage, which her mother put down to ‘growing’. It was a strange, lonely, rather miserable time, until the day she saw the advertisement in the newspaper.
It was an old copy of The Suffragette, wrapped around a bag of chips bought by one of the girls in the jam factory, and the advertisement read:
DO YOU WORK IN A SWEATSHOP?
WE CAN HELP!
FAIR WAGES FOR FAIR WORK.
And underneath was the address of the Women’s Hall, the centre of the women’s campaign for the vote in the East End.
Nell had torn out the advertisement and taken it home with her.
The family were – at that time – going through one of their periodic rough patches. Nell’s little brother Bernie had diphtheria, and since there was no money to send him to the infirmary, he had had to be nursed at home. This meant that the work her mother could do was limited, since much of her day was taken up with nursing him, and the additional cost of the doctor’s bills were putting their usual strain on the family budget. This meant less food for everybody. It meant they got ‘behind’ on the rent, which since Mrs O’Farrell lived below them, made life rather difficult. Mrs O’Farrell rented the whole house from another, grander landlord, and sublet the two upstairs rooms to the Swancotts; if they couldn’t pay their rent, she couldn’t pay hers either. Nell’s mother borrowed money from Uncle Jack, and from neighbours, but doctors were expensive, and Bernie showed no signs of getting better.
Nell hated her mum’s work. She hated how much Mum toiled over every shirt and she hated the pittance she was paid. In the jam factory, a woman’s wage was less than a man’s, whether you were paid by the hour or by the number of boxes you filled. It was the same everywhere. Women teachers were paid less than men. So were women in mills, and factories, and country houses, and shops, and tearooms, and palaces – Nell was hazy on how the monarchy worked, but she was pretty sure that King George got paid more than Queen Victoria ever had. The argument was that a man had to earn enough to support a family. What widows were supposed to do was never explained.
The next day, Nell had gone to the Suffragettes’ shop on the Roman Road, with the newspaper advertisement in her hand, and told the women about her mother. There were two ladies in the shop; one was ‘gentry’, but the other was an East End woman like Nell’s mother. They’d taken the particulars, and told Nell they’d use her evidence as part of their campaign against sweated labour.
‘But you can’t ban sweatshops,’ Nell had said. ‘Can you?’
‘You certainly can,’ said the Suffragette woman fiercely. ‘You’ll see.’
And she’d given Nell a handbill, with details of the local meetings, and the Young Suffragettes club.
A week later, a woman had come round to their house with an offer of dressmaking work for Nell’s mother from a socialist organisation. Nell’s mother had wept, and Nell’s father had shaken her hand and told her he’d always thought women would do a better job of running the country than Mr Asquith did. Nell’s father didn’t have a vote either; to do so he would have had to own land worth at least £10, or pay £10 rent a year. Nell’s father was a great admirer of Miss Pankhurst.
‘Ruddy marvellous work you ladies are doing!’ he said, and insisted on opening a tin of condensed milk and making the woman a cup of tea.
The next week, Nell had presented herself at the Young Suffragettes club, and spent a bewildering evening listening to suffrage arguments and making banners out of old bedsheets. The week after that, she’d helped give out handbills while a lady in a Suffragette rosette had stood in the street on a soap box and argued with passers-by about equal pay for women. Nell thought the whole thing was marvellous.
She’d been a Suffragette ever since.
Sandwiches
EVELYN’S LOCAL SUFFRAGETTE group held meetings every Thursday evening. Evelyn had been along to one of these and found it rather dispiriting; like the dullest sort of committee meeting, much more interested in minutes and organising and dividing up the mundane work of newspaper-selling and shop-staffing and handbill-distributing than in slashing paintings in the National Gallery and setting off petrol bombs. Evelyn had hoped for a revolutionary cadre, and – to Teddy’s great relief – had found something much more like a Mother’s Union organising committee.
She had, however, agreed to take a slot selling The Suffragette on street corners.
‘I thought Saturday morning would be best,’ she said to Teddy. ‘On the high street, or maybe outside the church. Somewhere where lots of Mother’s friends will see me.’
Evelyn had not told her parents about the Suffragettes. She was hoping they’d find out in the most public and dramatic way possible.
‘Perhaps I could sing,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Or shout revolutionary slogans. Do you think one shouts?’
‘What exactly do you think is going to happen when your parents find out about this?’ said Teddy, amused despite himself. ‘It’s hardly going to help you get to Oxford, is it?
Evelyn flushed.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘And I don’t care. They subjugated me, and they’ve ruined my life, and they damn well ought to know it.’
But selling copies of The Suffragette on street corners proved a rather dispiriting task. Most people hurried past without buying anything. Some were openly scornful and combative, including a middle-aged lady who told her very plainly that a woman’s concern should be her husband and children, not politics. One or two pointed and jeered. A young man in horn-rimmed spectacles told her giving women the vote would be a disaster, because one week out of every four, women were biologically incapable of rational thought. This was rather a shocking thing for a strange man to say, and for a moment Evelyn was blindsided. Then she told him furiously that that meant three weeks out of every four they were capable, which was more than could be said for men.
Several tried to interest her in their own pet campaigns. Evelyn had to listen for nearly twenty minutes to an elderly gentleman from a temperance society, who clearly saw her as a tame subject for conversion. After he’d finally left, he’d been replaced by a woman who had explained that Suffragettes were all very well, though she didn’t have time for that sort of thing herself, but what was really important was the poor little heathen children in Africa, and would Evelyn like a pamphlet, since she was here? You see, the thing was …
Evelyn also had to deal with two men wanting directions, a young lady
wanting to know the time, and an elderly lady who told her at great length about her granddaughter, who was just Evelyn’s age, and was having such difficulties.
She hadn’t even seen anyone she knew, except a couple of girls from school, who had stared. What was the point of being publicly humiliated, if you couldn’t annoy your parents while you did so?
Desperate measures were obviously necessary. So, a month later, she signed up to walk around Hampstead wearing a sandwich board advertising the next Suffragette rally in Hyde Park. If that didn’t attract her parents’ attention, she felt, nothing would.
The ladies of the West Hampstead Franchise Society assembled on Saturday morning in the suffrage shop, feeling somewhat daunted. Evelyn was wearing a white muslin ‘party’ dress, with a VOTES FOR WOMEN rosette affixed to her shoulder. Miss Wilkinson, the local organiser, was in green, while Miss Colyer was in a violet costume, which had looked rather well at home, but now seemed decidedly … visible. All of the ladies were wearing sandwich boards of the type worn to advertise CLOSING DOWN SALES and FINAL REDUCTIONS, and were carrying leaflets advertising a rally protesting the fact that the Free Irish were still allowed to campaign in Hyde Park while the Suffragettes had been banned.
There were eleven ladies present, including Evelyn, Miss Wilkinson, and Miss Colyer, a young English teacher who had never done anything more daring than try to sell copies of The Suffragette in the street and retire in confusion when a sign-painter asked why she thought she should have a vote when he didn’t. Miss Colyer was studying herself with some alarm in the little mirror on the lid of her powder compact. Evelyn rather sympathised. Fortunately for Miss Colyer, the mirror was too small to show the true horror of her predicament.
‘I feel like a belted knight,’ said Miss Wilkinson, in a tone of some amusement. ‘If anyone knocks me over, I’m going to have to lie flat on my back until someone picks me up.’
‘I feel like a character in a pantomime,’ said Miss Colyer. She peered at herself anxiously in the glass. ‘I do wish we hadn’t got to do this in Hampstead. It’s so much easier to be plucky when you don’t have to worry about bumping into the neighbours.’
‘I shouldn’t worry,’ said Miss Wilkinson drily. ‘I doubt any of the neighbours would recognise us in this get-up.’
Miss Colyer brightened momentarily, then paled as she remembered that worse fates awaited a Suffragette than being recognised by the neighbours.
‘They won’t … throw things, will they?’ she said.
‘They might,’ said one of the other women. ‘But you needn’t worry about stones – they never throw them hard enough to matter. And you soon get used to mud. It’s the rubbish I mind. Rotten vegetables, and apple cores, and banana skins, and all that sort of thing.
‘Oh,’ said Miss Colyer. She and Evelyn exchanged a worried glance.
• • •
The ladies of the West Hampstead Franchise Society marched down the street with an air of controlled terror. To Evelyn’s disappointment and mild amusement, their one aim seemed to be to finish their route as quickly as possible, preferably before anyone they knew recognised them. All were armed with handbills, and a few even managed to thrust one in the face of the more obvious gawkers. Miss Wilkinson, in fact, actually approached several passers-by, with a smile and a cheery ‘Votes for women?’
But in this she was alone.
The sight of eleven ladies dressed in sandwich boards and suffrage colours was enough to cause comment at best and outright ridicule – and rotten vegetables – at worst. A young man selling newspapers on the corner yelled, ‘You oughta be ashamed of yourselves!’
Miss Wilkinson stopped and turned majestically to face him, nearly causing Miss Preddle, who was behind her, to walk into her wooden front.
‘Oh, lord!’ said Miss Preddle.
‘I don’t see,’ she said to the newspaper-seller, ‘what I have to be ashamed of.’
The newspaper-seller was clearly rather taken aback by this direct attack.
‘No,’ he said, ‘but see here. Why should women have the vote? They don’t pay taxes.’
‘Certainly they do,’ said Miss Wilkinson. ‘I myself am a schoolmistress – I pay taxes. Perhaps you think I shouldn’t? In which case, I’d be delighted if you’d pass on that opinion to the government. I’m sure they’d be interested to hear your thoughts.’
There was some laughter and a few ironical cheers from a butcher’s boy on a bicycle, who had slowed to listen. The newspaper-seller scratched his chin and made the best of a bad situation.
‘Naw, but,’ he said. ‘Men go to war, don’t they? They die for their country. Women don’t.’
‘Some men go to war,’ said Miss Wilkinson. ‘And some do not.’ Her expression made it very clear which sort of man she thought the newspaper-seller was. ‘And under our current system, those who do, do not vote. And women, who risk their lives every time they bring a child into the world, also do not. As far as I can tell, risking your life for your country rather loses you your right to vote than otherwise.’
Evelyn was rather impressed with this piece of logic. A man could only vote in an election if he’d been resident in the country for the previous year, which naturally ruled out most of the armed forces.
A small crowd was gathering. Miss Wilkinson looked around to acknowledge the few scattered cheers that greeted this last sally and gestured to the other Suffragettes to start giving out handbills.
Miss Colyer said, in the tones of one about to face a firing squad, ‘I do believe that woman there has a little boy in my Sunday School.’
‘She’ll hardly recognise you guyed up like this,’ said Miss Preddle encouragingly. Miss Colyer sighed and turned to a very grubby little girl in a white smock lugging a baby.
‘Would you like a handbill?’ she said hopefully.
‘Coo!’ said the little girl.
‘Oi!’ said the butcher’s boy, who was evidently growing bored. ‘Suffragette!’ Miss Colyer turned, and the boy lobbed half a fish-paste sandwich at her. It hit her left cheek, and the boy hooted, while his friends cheered. The woman with a little boy in Miss Colyer’s Sunday School looked scandalised, and hurried away.
Miss Colyer pulled out her handkerchief, wiped her face, and sighed.
‘Goodness,’ she said. ‘It’s all very well, sacrificing yourself for your cause, but I do think men have it easier. At least people cheer when you go off to fight in the wars. I think I’d rather be blown up than have people throw things at me in the street.’
Evelyn thought she rather agreed. This was not the glamorous outlaw life she’d hoped for.
‘I think we should set fire to things,’ she said darkly. ‘At least if you’re setting fire to deserted manor houses, you don’t have to deal with frightful missionary women, and butcher’s boys throwing sandwiches.’
‘Just wives in attics, and hunchback recluses,’ Miss Colyer agreed. ‘And spiders.’
‘Hunchback recluses,’ said Evelyn, ‘would be no problem at all.’
May Morning
WHEN MAY WANTED something, she usually got it. She wanted to see the girl in the flat cap again very much indeed. So a few weeks later, she said to her mother, ‘I don’t think we got much look at what those East End Suffragettes were doing, do you? I mean, mostly we saw what the policemen were doing. Can’t we go and look at something a bit more hopeful?’
May’s mother said, ‘Goodness, darling! Wasn’t last time enough for you? You could have been killed!’
May didn’t think she had come very close to being killed, but she knew better than to argue.
‘Not everything they do can be as dangerous as that,’ she said, instead. ‘They do pageants for May Morning in the park, don’t they, and things like that? There must be something safer we could go to.’
Most local suffrage societies were members of two larger organisations: the more peaceable National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, led by Mrs Millicent Fawcett, and the more militant Women’s
Social and Political Union, led by Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst. The East London Federation of Suffragettes, however, were members of neither.
Two months after the meeting in the Bow Baths Hall, and the ELFS were holding an anti-sweating demonstration at the Kensington Olympia. There would be stalls advertising Miss Sylvia Pankhurst’s work against sweatshops, and other, similar organisations; stalls selling products produced by women paid a living wage; and, the star attraction, a group of actual sweated labourers, doing their daily work in public.
It was exactly the sort of project that sparked May’s mother’s interest, despite a vague concern that the women were being treated as ‘exhibits in a zoological gardens’. This turned out not to be the case, however. All the women were eager to explain their life to the crowds. Some had their children with them – and these naturally attracted a great deal of interest.
‘How does one manage to look after children and work at the same time?’ May’s mother asked one woman, who had a baby and a little boy.
The woman said, ‘Well, you can’t, ma’am. Not without as he goes and gets hisself into mischief. I just keeps him strapped in his high chair, and he ain’t no trouble.’
May’s mother said, horrified, ‘You mean he sits in his chair all day?’
May glanced at her mother and edged quietly away. She wasn’t interested in sweatshop workers anyway.
She was looking for Nell.
The hall was a huge, cavernous space, with a high glass ceiling and stalls and people everywhere. But May wasn’t looking for an attendee; if Nell was here, she would be working, which was easier. Even so, there were a lot of stalls, a lot of women handing out leaflets, a lot of people who might have been Suffragettes or might just have been stewards; it was hard to be sure.
Things a Bright Girl Can Do Page 4